


the secret's veil was covering your face

by kafkas



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Angst, Excessive use of Pushkin, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Pining, Post-Canon, The perils of Stalinist Russia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 11:55:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15000380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafkas/pseuds/kafkas
Summary: Isn't it funny how they're always meeting by rivers?Budapest, 1936.





	the secret's veil was covering your face

**Author's Note:**

> This was a real labour of love for me as both a writer and an aspiring historian. I tried to portray realistically a Europe teetering on the brink of fascism. If anyone detects any historical inaccuracies, please be sure to let me know!

 

He stumbles across her on the banks of the Danube, a wicker basket full of leek and scallion looped over one arm, the leash of a yapping pomeranian wrapped around the other – and isn’t it funny how they’re always meeting by rivers? Her hair is cut boyishly, as is the style, and for a moment Gleb barely recognizes her. She is, he thinks, an apparition – a name lodged on the tip of his tongue, an echo of another time. And then she opens her mouth.

‘Shvibzik, _stop that_.’ She harshly tears the dog away from a barrel of sturgeon, apologizing to the fishmonger profusely. Her eyes, hidden behind her sunglasses, flash deep Prussian blue, and Gleb feels as if he’s been hit upside the head.

‘An—’ His voice dies in his throat. What name, then, to shout? And what to do when she runs?

What to do if she stays?

The dog, mercifully, decides for him. Setting off at a gallop, it drags its owner towards the Széchenyi, the bridge’s leonine abutments gleaming in the pale morning light. Gleb watches her disappear – the shining kernel of her hair, the wild way her arms swing at her sides, ragged momentum nearly dislodging her groceries. There one instant, and vanished the next.

_In foreign lands devoutly clinging,_

_I let a captive bird go winging._

‘You – know Miss Nastenka, _igen?_ ’ An old butcher woman, having noticed Gleb’s searching gaze.

Abruptly, he lands foot-first back in reality. ‘Pardon me?’ he sputters.

‘Nastenka Sudayeva.’ She tilts her head, shrewdly. ‘You Russian, _nem?_ ’

‘No.’ His mouth twists sourly with the lie. ‘No, travelling.’

‘Ah. Well. That settles it.’ With a shrug, the butcher woman returns to her carving knives. ‘Those Russians, they no travel, do they? Only _run_.’

Gleb purses his lips.

 

 

 

An undesirable, that’s what Gorlinsky had called him; had not minced words either when issuing Gleb his papers, a new name and an outpost to oversee in Budapest. ‘You’re lucky they’re not sending you to the Kolyma. You think Stalin doesn’t have spies in bourgeois cities like Paris, hm?’

So here he is: just shy of forty and playing camp master to a group of Hungarian Leninists. At his age, his father was already the regional minister of justice. What would he say if he could see Gleb now? A resident. Emotionally compromised, liable to capitulate.

Both of them, then, are exiles – he and Anya, for he sees her often, now that he knows to look for her; bartering fiercely at the Great Market Hall, reading Schiller and Goethe in the shadow of Buda Castle. Often the conman, Dimitri, is close at hand, a picnic blanket bundled under one arm. They make a charming, exotic couple – as attuned to each other as animals, their conversations playing out silently in the brush of a hand, a quirk of the lip.

Gleb follows them home one night, watches from the terrace courtyard as they fuss about the kitchen – ‘Dima, that’s too much spätzle, you’ll overflow the bowl!’ – ‘Bah. I’ll just add flour.’ – ‘But the recipe _says_ –’ Here Dimitri folds his arms about her waist, nuzzling her neck. Anya shrieks, and Gleb feels something inside of him snarl and bare its teeth. Her whooping laugh. The golden window shining in the darkness.

It is unwise, tailing them like he is. At best it is an unpleasant distraction, at worst –

If his superiors in Leningrad should somehow catch wind of his malingering… If word were to arise of a young woman in Budapest with Nicholas II’s large, solemn blue eyes… well. Gleb doesn’t like to imagine the consequences, though he suspects it would involve a nighttime raid and an isolated cell in the Russian consulate’s office. Three posts at the firing range.

Gleb decides it is best to let sleeping dogs lie. After six months of good behavior, he will request transfer to somewhere closer to home. The Caucasus, perhaps. God be willing Gorlinsky’s forgiven him by then.

 

 

 

It is as he is headed home from his outpost that the violence breaks out. Men in uniform carrying banners – a green cross, a white sphere. Civilians scattering – women in headscarves, the men with their kippah, prayer shawls slipping from their shoulders. A shot rings out, and Gleb dives for cover behind an overturned grocer’s cart. Crushed cabbage leaves stain the knees of his suit, the smell of trampled vegetation flooding his nostrils. Everywhere there is screaming, the clatter of heels against cobblestones, the harsh crack of rifle fire.

Gleb fumbles for his holster, only to remember that he has left his pistol in the locked drawer of his hotel room. And why not? Gleb is plainly dressed, unobtrusive. Why should anybody want to shoot him? Not since the days of the revolution has he cowered like this, fearing for his life.

Clambering to his feet, he surveys the scene unfolding before him: shell-shocked men and women pressed up against the alley wall while soldiers search their pockets for money, jewelry. A woman wails as her wedding ring is torn from her finger, another pleading in Hebrew as her husband is pummeled to the ground before her.

It is as Gleb is peering numbly at this spectacle that a man wrests him by the forearm. Ears still ringing from the gunfire, Gleb had not heard him speaking.

‘What?’ he says, ‘What?’

The soldier repeats the question. ‘ _Zsidó vagy?_ ’

Gleb spreads his hands feebly. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’

The air leaves his lungs in a rush as the rifle stock is rammed into his stomach and he doubles over, gasping for breath.

‘ _Találtam másik!_ ’ the soldier shouts, and Gleb, sensing imminent danger, wrenches himself away. The man – he’s a boy, really, and panicky – swivels the barrel so that it is aimed at his chest. ‘ _Állj!_ ’ he barks, and Gleb doesn’t need a dictionary to understand what is being asked of him. ‘I’m just… giving you my papers,’ he grits. There is an instant between reaching for his pocket and the widening of the boy’s eyes that Gleb senses he has made a dreadful mistake, but by then it is too late. Something strikes his shoulder hard enough to send him spinning, and then the pavement is rushing up to greet him. A cold, dry sound, like the crunch of hard-packed snow, and then —

 

 

 

_Amidst the Hell_

_Of everyday distress,_

_I’ve seen you, but the secret’s veil_

_Was covering your face —_

_your fair eyes—_

_sad and bright—_

_a murmur of the sea—_

_maybe, I’m in love._

 

Voices, hushed beyond the bedroom door. Long shadows stain the carpet.

‘Anya, you can’t be serious –’

‘It’s only for a little while.’

‘— the Arrow Cross –’

‘— papers –’

‘— death sentence.’

For an instant, Gleb is a young boy again, sleeping in the barracks of Ipatiev House, listening to the soldiers’ talk. In a moment, his father will come to bid him goodnight – even though Gleb is far too old for such trifles, even though the other cadets will tease him for it come morning. If he closes his eyes, he can feel the depression of the mattress where his mother would once sit and stroke his hair, crooning lullabies.

_The Terek runs over its rocky bed_

_And splashes its dark wave;_

_A sly brigand crawls along the bank_

_Sharpening his dagger;_

_But your father is an old warrior_

_Hardened by battle;_

_So sleep, my Glebka, undisturbed,_

_Lullaby a-bye, a-bye…_

 

 

 

Dawn, coals glowing dimly in the hearth. Gleb watches, dazed, as a chamber stick passes overhead, followed by a knobbly wrist, a tobacco stained shirt-cuff. The candle is set on the bedside table, beside a roll of bandages.

‘Ah. I see the sleeping beauty has awoken.’

Gleb squints, trying to focus. Above him, the craggy countenance of the Yusapov conman swims into view – the vulpine nose, the wry, smiling mouth. Gleb, affronted, attempts to sit up, only to collapse onto his back an instant later, winded. Dimitri watches him struggle bemusedly, a hand cushioning his chin.

‘Not quite the Lady with the Lamp you were imagining, hm?’

‘Where’s the girl?’ Gleb croaks, and Dimitri narrows his eyes.

‘Asleep.’ No longer is his host so amicable. ‘You caused quite a stir last night. It’s a wonder you didn’t wake the entire floor.’

‘Floor –?’ Gleb glances about, at the tasseled lampshades, the cluttered bureau. A samovar sits steeping on a low table, the pot of rich jam beside it tingeing the air sour. Beyond the window with its rich drapery, the cigarette dish fermenting on the sill, is a gnarled cherry tree, just beginning to blossom. Below it, the courtyard, tiles still slick with rain. Gleb feels a disconcerting tug of vertigo – to be at once on the inside, looking out…

‘You want to tell me what happened back there?’ Dimitri asks, and suddenly Gleb remembers. The agonizing haul over the terrace gate; crawling on his belly up the interior staircase; Anya’s open-mouthed surprise – Dimitri’s stern-jawed indignation – as he had crumpled to his knees on their threshold.

Pasarét. The papers. He had awoken what felt like hours after the attack, dried saliva crusting in his beard, a clear fluid draining from what he now suspects may be a broken nose. It was cold, and dark, though in the distance he could smell kerosene, and hear the crackle of flames. Discarded papers and minor pengő stuck to the damp cobblestones, flickering in the breeze. Gleb, with some difficulty, had keeled onto one side and, poking gingerly at the meat of his shoulder –

‘Shot.’ He chokes, attempting to sit up again. ‘That boy, he –’

With a rattle, Dimitri brandishes a pair of medical forceps – grasped between their prongs, a tiny pellet of iron, misshapen as if flattened beneath the wheels of a train.

Gleb deflates, sighing.

‘Listen – you’ve helped enough. As soon as I am able, I will leave you be.’

Dimitri shrugs. ‘Sure you will. Though you may want to thank Anya before you go. She’s the one who patched you up.’

Gleb examines the Grand Duchess’s careful handiwork – the stitching as small as that of a child’s, the compress of peppermint and marjoram plastered to his ribs. She had, he recalls, worked in a hospital. And then of course there was the war before that.

Dimitri watches him with the alert, beady eyes of a taiga creature, lips a thin, pale line.

‘Though between you and me,’ he murmurs, ‘I’d prefer it if you just disappeared.’ Here, a cruel smile. ‘ _Comrade_.’

As Dmitri leaves, Gleb does not miss the sound of the door locking behind him.

 

 

 

Sudayev Floydorovich. He remembers the name suddenly, as he hovers half-asleep, watching the ceiling fan rotate lazily. Dimitri Floydorovich Sudayev. An orphan boy. Worked production lines from Moscow to Tsaritsyn before disappearing from public records sometime in 1925. It was assumed he had been killed in an industrial accident. Father Nikolai Sudayev, an anarchist – blew himself up along with the rest of the underground resistance in 1919. Mother dead some years earlier, a typhoid victim.

Gleb had filed the case, back when he was still working as a clerk. Had marveled that a father might be so selfish. This was before Gleb’s own _papa_ –

He wonders if Dimitri will turn him in to the authorities. Certainly Anya won’t – she is far too forgiving in that sense – but an anarchist’s son…

Gleb is not a fool – he sees the looks people give him on the street in Leningrad. The feral, frightened glances. Hears, too, the poorly concealed dislike in the voices of shop assistants and station workers. ‘Yes, of course, Comrade Vaganov’ – ‘Right away, Comrade Commissioner.’ Always that curl of the lip around the style, a bitter pill: _comrade._

Yes, he thinks. Dimitri would quite enjoy seeing him suffer.

 

 

 

Three days pass in this manner; Gleb too weary to run, yet aware, in some primordial part of his brain, that to sleep would be to leave himself open to attack. Beyond the bedroom door, he listens to Anya and Dmitri arguing – if you could even call it that. There is too much warmth in the duchess’s voice to suggest any degree of anger, and Dmitri is always too quick to back down when confronted.

‘He’s obviously a spy. I say hand him over to the police’

‘Ah, yes, the incorruptible arm of the law. Remind who it answers to again: the Arrow Cross or the Hungarian National Sociali—’

‘Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know – _but_.’ Gleb strains his ears. ‘What if he… you know… _tells_.’

‘He won’t.’ Such surety! ‘He didn’t in Paris, and he won’t now. Imagine what the Commissariat would do to him if they found out?’

‘Imagine what they’d do to _us_.’

‘I don’t need to.’ Dmitri falls silent. Gleb imagines now the girl coming round the table to meet him, her pale hands cupping his face. Sees the Romanov eyes, full of quiet and dignified anguish. ‘Dima, _solnyshko._ That man is not responsible for what happened in Yekaterinburg. Hurting him will not bring me any kind of peace.’

‘And what about me, hm? Don’t _I_ deserve _my_ peace?’

Where Dimitri’s voice thickens in sorrow, Anya’s remains firm. ‘Gleb Vaganov did not kill your parents, Dima. From the look he gave me in Paris, it’s likely he’s never killed anyone.’ A beat. ‘At least, not with his bare-hands.’

Gleb bristles at those words – at their shameful truth. There are graveyards full of the men he’s buried, without ever once seeing their faces. Leningrad, presided over by a coward. Maybe Anastasia could see that. Maybe that’s why she ran when anyone else might have adhered to his word.

From the kitchen, there comes a heavy sigh. ‘Perhaps I am too softhearted.’ The sound of a cigarette being lit, a chair scraping across floorboards. ‘I will speak with him tomorrow. Now, go feed Shvibzik.’

Gleb swallows dryly.

_Tomorrow._

 

 

 

He dreams that night of the House of Special Purpose. Of a narrow staircase that seems to shrink and warp as he descends toward the damp cellar. The musky smell of the adobe floor. The mother’s perfume; a nauseating, medicinal mixture of pine needle and birch-wood. The father’s peculiar features, almost feminine; the emaciated ankles peeking out from beneath the poorly hemmed pants like those of an old man’s.

How does Gleb remember all these details? He doesn’t. His mind conjures them up as if to torture him.

Behind their parents, in portrait formation, are the children. Olga and Tatiana, the dark-haired eldest, as slender and as timid as sylvan does. Maria positively cherubic in comparison. Against her hip is nestled the Tsarevich Alexei, too weak to stand, face flushed pink with fever. In the silence of the cellar, Gleb can hear his breath whistle from his lungs, a wet, rattling sound.

‘Where is –’ _Anastasia_ , he means to ask, though somehow he senses this would be inappropriate.

Nicholas smiles at him grimly. When he speaks, it is in a rasping tongue Gleb cannot decipher. _Skeletons,_ he thinks, nonsensically. _All of them._

And then, slowly, gingerly, Alexei is detaching himself from his sisters and approaching Gleb with a single-minded determination. His splinted leg makes his gait stiff and lopsided. Instinctually, Gleb reaches out to steady the boy, but Alexei shrugs him off. Into his hand he presses a straw figure, dressed in a babushka’s scarf and shawl. Gleb blinks, bewildered.

‘Maslenitsa?’ he murmurs, and Alexei nods enthusiastically. Gleb runs a finger over the doll’s rough surface, wonders where the Tsarevich could have possibly found the twine and felt to make it. He represses a chuckle. Gleb has not played this game since he was a toddler – barely remembers the rules of the festival – and yet the sight of the old woman with her solemn, charcoal features fills him with warmth.

When he looks up again, he is alone, save for two vacant stools. Somehow, the sight of the far wall, empty and stained with rust – stained with – well. It frightens him far more than the ghosts.

 

 

 

He bolts, of course. Waits until Anya is out running errands and Dimitri is otherwise occupied before he dares attempt the hike from his bed to the window. The creaky shutters give him pause, but Gleb is a soldier, and with a few thumps of his good shoulder he is scaling the ivy trellis down to the courtyard below.

He lands heavily and feels his ribs protest, but no longer has to worry about surmounting the gate, as some absent minded lodger has left it open. Rolling up the cuffs of his dress-shirt – one of his hosts had hidden his jacket – Gleb calmly strolls out into the street, hoping that he looks like some sort of bohemian artist and not an escaped patient (prisoner?). Smiling widely at a passing cyclist, he quickens his pace until he is sprinting over the uneven cobblestones. He makes it roughly ten meters.

‘Gleb!’

At the sound of her voice, he trips, staggering hectically. Righted at the last moment by a firm hand, he whirls, ready to shove her away, only to be rooted to the spot.

‘Gleb,’ the Grand Duchess Anastasia repeats, frowning perplexedly, ‘Where are you going?’

He stammers, again the thunderstruck fool of 1927, held in the thrall of a girl half his size.

As if sensing his alarm, Anya smiles knowingly, and, confident that he won’t flee, releases her iron grip on his shirtsleeve.

‘I was just getting breakfast.’ She raises a brown paper bag, greased with butter. ‘You’ll eat before you take your leave of us, I hope?’

‘I – I –’ he rubs his beard, squinting at her dazedly, ‘ _Anastasia_.’

‘Tch.’ A warning finger. ‘Best keep your voice down. It’s Nastenka, here.’

‘Nastenka, of course.’ The butcher woman. Gleb had almost forgotten.

‘Come.’ Though she, too, smiles under the scrutiny of passersby, her stare implores him. ‘You simply must try Dima’s quince cheese. It’s to die for.’

 

 

 

Gleb stares. He cannot help it. In her gingham dress and espadrilles, Anya looks like a country girl off to the city for the day. With her bobbed hair, there is an air of Mary Pickford about her rather than Tatyana Larina. A modern woman.

‘How do you eat?’ he demands, as they ascend the stairs, ‘What do you – do?’

Anya laughs broadly at his fretting. ‘Not what you’re imagining. Dima plays an excellent game of thimblerig. And there is of course Nana’s allowance.’

He feels a faint pang of disappointment at that, but then, from a conman and an aristocrat, what had he expected?

True to her word, Dimitri is waiting for them in the kitchen when they reenter the apartment. Anya he embraces expansively, only taking notice of Gleb after he has begun to root around in her grocery basket.

‘You!’ Blatant outrage. This is the second time Gleb has been pointed at this morning. ‘I locked you in.’

‘You locked him in?’ Anya exclaims, ‘ _Dima_ , he’s our guest.’

‘Guest,’ he huffs, ‘Who’ll you be having over for tea tonight? Joseph Stalin?’

‘Ignore him.’

Gleb placidly raises a hand. ‘Please. I will go.’

‘ _No_ ,’ chorus his hosts.

Gleb blinks, stunned by the force of their reaction. Sighing, Dimitri returns to his place at the counter, muttering under his breath.

‘It’s your papers, Gleb,’ Anya says, very carefully. Gleb watches as she fiddles with her dress’s braided drawstring; her fingers, he is bizarrely pleased to note, are chapped red from years of honest labor.

‘My papers.’

‘Your passport and _metrika_.’

‘The fakes,’ Dimitri proffers, bitterly, as if he himself hasn’t forged over a dozen personal identity cards.

‘Lost, yes, on the night of the riot.’

Anya, her tongue pinched between her teeth, expression drawn, shakes her head. ‘Not – exactly.’

 

 

 

It’s not the most flattering photo. Gleb does not consider himself a vain man, but something about the false nature of his smile had irked him at the time. Now, stamped across the front page of the _Pravda_ , it positively enrages.

‘ _Gellért Vastagh_ ,’ Dimitri reads from over his shoulder, ‘Did you come up with that, or did the Commissariat?’ Gleb can hear his smile.

‘They’re trying to smoke you out,’ Anya murmurs, gently, ‘There’s a warrant out for your arrest. Posters at every train station, every airport.’

‘I – my superiors – they’ll send new documents.’ In saying the words out loud, he feels their hopelessness hit home. There is no one coming to rescue him. And, really: if some grunt from the Arrow Cross had managed to sniff him out at only a cursory glance, had any effort at all gone into concealing him in the first place? Had Gorlinsky even expected him to come back? _Wanted_ him to?

‘The government’s in a state of upheaval,’ Anya offers, as if sensing his dejection, ‘Your boss probably gave you outdated papers.’

‘Used the wrong color ink,’ Dimitri supplies, and he’d know.

Gleb rises from his slump at the dining table, pale-faced. ‘Undesirable,’ he murmurs, hollowly.

‘Gleb?’

‘Please.’ He clears his throat. The creature in his ribcage shudders and keens. ‘My – my things. My coat. I must take my leave of you.’

‘That’s a – _bad_ idea.’ Dimitri is approaching him with outturned palms, his expression a mixture of apprehension and – something more foreign. Gleb thinks it might be pity.

What a sad sight he must make.

He turns back to Anya, hoping that she, at least, will understand – that Gleb is a _good,_ _loyal_ Russian – that he has a _duty_ to do –

Only it is not Anya’s gaze that meets his, but Alexei Romanov’s, his skin wine-stained and bloated in death. Gleb lets out a garbled sort of scream and staggers backward, the insides of his knees hitting something solid. The last thing he hears is glass shattering, Dimitri cursing expansively, and then he is out cold.

 

 

 

He awakens, hours later, to find that the bedroom window has been nailed shut. Anya stands beside it in a silk kimono, her arms crossed. It is dark outside. Gleb avoids looking at her bare legs, the white cradle of her throat. If he does, he doesn’t think he will be able to stop.

‘You broke our coffee table.’ Her voice is low, hoarse. There is a cigarette callipered loosely between two of her fingers.

‘I’ll pay for it.’

‘No, you won’t.’

‘No, I won’t,’ Gleb agrees. He pats his pockets down. ‘I think those soldiers stole my wallet too.’

Anya laughs, mirthlessly. ‘Those men,’ she says, ‘ _aren’t_ soldiers.’ She closes her eyes, tilting her head back against the wall. ‘My father was a soldier,’ she breathes, exhaling smoke, ‘Count Boris was a soldier. _Dyadka_ Klementy. Derevenko. The men I nursed at Tsarskoye Selo. Brave soldiers, honest men. Men like _that_ –’ she inclines her chin toward Gleb’s bullet wound, ‘are animals.’

Gleb massages his shoulder, considering this. ‘I… cannot stay here, can I?’ At Anya’s foreboding look, he amends, ‘In Budapest.’

‘No.’ A crease appears between her brows. She, too, is beginning to grasp the direness of their situation. ‘No, you can’t…’

‘Surely the police…’

‘The police are under the thumb of the Arrow Cross.’ She smiles, sadly. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Gleb. If you’d been here on a diplomatic assignment, perhaps then you could have pled for clemency but…’ She peers at him, disappointedly. ‘I never took you for a spy. It’s so…’

‘Sordid?’

‘Ignoble.’

Gleb scoffs. ‘Is that how you thought of me? _Noble?_ ’

Anya’s gaze is frank. ‘It’s how you thought of yourself.’

‘Yes, well.’ He stares down at his lap, deflating. ‘Times change.’

‘And yet… you want to go back.’

‘I want –’ _Answers._ ‘I – I cannot _stand_ to… to have them think so ill of me. Gorlinsky. And the men at the Commissariat. They set me up. They must have.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it.’ Anya stubs out her cigarette. ‘The day they –’ she hesitates a moment, pursing her lips, ‘That day in Yekaterinburg, they told us we were going on a trip. They made Alyosha’s doctor wake us. We – my brother and sisters and I – were all so excited. We thought it was Kerensky come to rescue us, just like he promised to. It was only when Mama began to cry that I sensed something was –’ She glances up then, her eyes flashing wetly in the candlelight. ‘It’s a cruel place, Gleb. Your Union. And you are a good man. I’d hate to see what might happen to you, should you decide to return.’

‘You think they’ll kill me.’

‘Maybe.’ She shrugs. ‘Maybe something worse.’

A beat. Anya shivers, tugging her sleeping gown closely about her shoulders, and pads forward across the hardwood floor. Gleb swallows dryly. How many times has he imagined this? Her coming to him in the dark, sitting down beside him on the bed. Her calloused fingers, reaching for his shirt collar.

‘Your wound,’ she murmurs with a quirk of her lip. Instantly, Gleb is catapulted from his reverie.

‘What?’

Anya chuckles quietly. ‘Your bandages – you’ve bled through them.’

‘Oh.’ He flushes, repositioning himself atop the pillows.

Anya’s expression, as she unfastens his buttons, is clinical, removed. ‘Dima and I leave for Odessa in two weeks. Volodya – Count Popov – knows a seaplane pilot there who’s going to take us to Istanbul.’

‘Istanbul? Wh—’

‘Budapest is becoming – untenable.’ Anya’s mouth twists, sourly. ‘You’re not the only one who’s been accosted in the streets, Gleb.’

‘O-of course.’

She is a free woman now, he reasons, a little hysterical. Why shouldn’t she go traipsing off to the Balkans?

‘The apartment is yours so long as you can pay the landlady,’ Anya continues, ‘I wouldn’t advise going back to your hotel to fetch your things – not unless you have a death wish.’ She looks him up and down. ‘Dima’s clothes ought to fit you.’

‘Your kindness is – immeasurable,’ Gleb chokes.

Ignoring him, Anya begins to unravel his bandages. ‘You are, of course, welcome to come with us. It’ll be tight, but our papers are current. Dima I can convince to forge another set, if you ask him very sweetly.’

‘I couldn’t possibly…’

‘You can, and you should.’ Anya cocks her head, squinting. ‘That night you were attacked, you came to us. Why?’

‘I…’ Gleb’s voice dies in his throat. It occurs to him suddenly that he does not know. He could have just as easily stumbled back to his hotel. And yet…

‘The Arrow Cross are on the lookout for a lone man. It will be safer for you, travelling in a group.’ Anya’s eyes crinkle at the corners, lovely. ‘Accept this kindness, Gleb. One comrade to another.’

It does not, he thinks, sound like an insult. Not when it’s coming from her.

 

 

 

Dimitri, as it happens, was not consulted. Rarely do he and Anya ever see eye-to-eye on matters of state, Gleb has discovered; Anya’s strange fondness for her home country, her forgiving attitude, a solid wall up against which Dimitri will toss all manner of incriminating evidence: Tambov, Astrakhan, and Kronstadt. It is not that she doesn’t grieve, or that she doesn’t wish to remember – rather, there is nowhere to lay the blame. Soviet leadership is an ever-evolving animal and the men that committed those atrocities – against Dimitri’s family, against Anya’s – are long gone. For all Anya sought to recover her past, she is, it seems, more grounded in the present than her companion.

‘Softhearted,’ Dimitri mutters, crouched before a chest of drawers, ‘ _Indulgent_.’

‘She locked me in.’

‘You might’ve escaped. Or do they not teach you how to do that, in fascist school?’

‘In “fascist school,” capture means dishonor, so no. Sometimes men are even told to commit suicide. They give you a –’ he demonstrates with his thumb and forefinger, ‘little capsule. Size of a pea. But I never rose high enough in the ranks to be bestowed that honor.’

‘Huh.’ Dimitri raises his eyebrows. ‘Pity.’ Rooting around in a pile of shirts, he retrieves a pink guayabera and tosses it at Gleb. ‘There. Try that on for size.’

Grimly, Gleb holds the thing up for inspection, nose wrinkled. ‘It’s…’

‘A gift,’ Dimitri interrupts, defensively, ‘From the Countess Malevitch.’

‘Charming.’

Brushing down his pants legs, Dimitri crosses over to the bureau and resumes work on Gleb’s half-finished papers. ‘You’re not to say a word to my photographer friend when he comes to take your picture. He thinks you’re a cousin of mine who’s lost his passport.’

‘Of course,’ says Gleb, ‘The mere notion of us being kin alone is enough to cow me.’

Surveying him – one eye comically magnified behind its jeweler’s loupe – Dimitri laughs dryly. ‘You’re funny, Vaganov. Real funny. Didn’t know you NKVD boys had a sense of humor.’

‘I was not always NKVD.’

Dimitri shrugs. ‘CHEKA, GPU, NKVD. Sticking a different name on it doesn’t change what it is: a nest of vipers.’

Gleb smiles flatly. ‘You really don’t like me, do you, Sudayev?’

‘You pointed a gun at Anya.’

‘I didn’t pull the trigger.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Dimitri looks away, dipping his pen into an inkwell. ‘Men already did that once,’ he says, quietly, ‘in 1918. It _oughtn’t_ have happened again.’

 

 

 

They love each other, plainly and without pretention. It is in the way they come together the night before they are all due to depart for Odessa, Gleb holding a pillow to his ears in order to block out the sounds. It is in the way Dimitri clasps Anya’s hand in his as they return their keys to the landlady. The old woman regards Gleb concernedly. In an effort to conceal his identity, Anya had granted Dimitri the honor of cutting his hair with a pair of rusty scissors. Bearded and haggard, his skull showing through between the ragged clumps, Gleb looks like a criminal.

It is a salve to his bruised ego that even Dimitri cannot seem to lift Anya’s spirits as their train pulls out of the Keleti Pályaudvar. He knows he should not feel so glad to see her decline Dimitri’s offer to visit the dining car, but something in his blood sings all the same to be alone with her in the sealed compartment, her legs, mere inches away from his, propped up on the seat opposite. The dog, Shvibzik, lays wheezing in her lap, one rheumy eye trained on Gleb as if waiting for the opportunity to snap at him.

‘Will you miss Budapest?’

Anya nods, chin nestled in her hand. The rainy cityscape casts strange shadows across her face, subterranean.

‘When did you… How long have you and…’

‘Five years.’ She sniffles, turning away from the window. ‘Before that it was…’ she thinks for a moment, ‘Austria. No – Croatia.’

‘Five years is a long time. You must consider Hungary home.’

‘Russia is my home.’ The look she throws him isn’t accusatory – not quite. ‘But Russia doesn’t exist anymore.’

‘So you just… tramp about Europe with a conman?’

‘It’s not so different from your job.’ Recognizing the harshness of words, she softens her tone. ‘When I was a young girl, I had to do a lot of unsavory things to survive. We both did, Dimitri and I. You should stop thinking of me as a grand duchess.’

An impossibility. How can he, with her face as solemn as the Tsarina’s cameo portraits, once hawked in the Sennoy? Seventeen years of careful breeding visible in the ramrod arch of her spine, the demure manner in which she folds her kid gloves atop her travelling valise? – gestures even she herself is unaware of. One does not simply elude one’s birthright. As a boy, Gleb had once wished to own an apple orchard. Now he tears families apart for a living under the guise of collectivism.

It is not, he thinks, an appropriate comparison.

Anya shifts in her seat, hunkering down into her woolen muffler. ‘Wake me when we reach the border,’ she mumbles, and then, miraculously, she is asleep. Gleb lingers a while, watching the doglike twitches of her face – hoping that her dreams are of the pleasant variety – and then rises to join Dimitri in the dining car.

 

 

 

They are met in Cluj-Napoca by a pair of Transylvanian siblings who introduce themselves as Petre and Mirela, friends of Count Popov. They too have about them the air of dispossessed aristocrats – furtive and eccentric, overtly preoccupied with their guests’ comfort. In their once sprawling farmhouse – cramped now that it’s been divided up amongst six other families – they demand Anya and Dimitri take the master bedroom. Gleb, an unwelcome third addition to their party, is left to sleep on the kitchen floor. He does not envy his saviors’ their cold, cavernous quarters. Bathed in the orange glow of the coal-fire oven, Gleb sleeps more soundly than he has in months.

The train tracks east of the capital are closed indefinitely. There are whispers of skirmishes with Soviet forces beyond Târgu Mureș, bombings and derailments. The news weighs heavily on Dimitri, who stalks about the farmhouse like a caged animal. Gone is his easy charm, his way with people. Romania is, Gleb thinks, too close to Russia. Its shadow looms over all of them.

Wary of Dimitri’s brooding manner, the children – rangy, grubby creatures – gravitate toward Gleb. The same felonious aura that arouses suspicion in adults provides their offspring with endless fodder for speculation. Is he a murderer? A war hero? They trail after him as he assists the menfolk about the property, splitting wood and tilling the earth. Occasionally he will lunge at them in jest and they will scramble away, shrieking with laughter. There is a soft-spoken little girl he is particularly fond of – she can’t be older than four – who insists on refilling his glass whenever they are seated at the dining table. She does the job poorly, spilling ale across the woven placemat, but Gleb indulges her all the same because never before has a child been so unafraid of him. In St. Petersburg, the urchins on his street had scattered at the sound of his footfalls in the snow, their eyes huge and hunted in their gaunt, pockmarked faces.

If he could – if it would not be such a horrible imposition upon these people – he’d stay in Cluj-Napoca and plant that orchard. Perhaps he’d even marry and have children of his own.

But there is, as there has always been, a duty he must fulfill.

 

 

 

He dreams, again, of Alexei. Waking suddenly, Gleb almost shouts to see a figure stood at the foot of his bedroll. Regaining lucidity, he realizes that it is only Dimitri, and not some faceless executioner come to gun him down. The kettle is burbling quietly atop the oven.

‘Nightmare?’

Gleb stares down at his lap, half expecting the straw doll to be lying there, discarded in his panic. Was it a nightmare? He shakes his head mutely.

Dimitri crosses his arms, leaning back against the kitchen cabinet. Sleepless and deprived of his usual, rakish attire, he seems somehow softer, as if the stress of travel has worn him smooth.

‘We leave at sunup. Thought you ought to know.’

Gleb swallows around the aching lump in his throat. ‘The train –?’

‘Petre’s friend Casimir has an oxcart. He’s going to take us south to a supply line that’s still operational. We’ll be sharing our car with a herd of cattle, but it’s safer than travelling on foot. Warmer, too. And faster…’ Dimitri has travelled under far worse conditions. These reassurances are for Gleb’s benefit alone.

He wants very badly for people to be happy. It’s an admirable trait, in a con.

‘You know, I did serve in the war.’

‘Yes.’ Dimitri scowls at him, defensive. Doubtless he’d been too young to fight.

‘You needn’t – feel obliged to indulge me. I don’t know how you think I lived when I was commissioner but it wasn’t all three-course meals and feather mattresses, I can tell you that.’

‘Oh no. Oh _no_. Don’t think for one second I’m – _indulging_ anything. My inborn politesse does not mean I care about you, Vaganov.’ It might just be the light of the stove, but Gleb could swear Dimitri is blushing.

‘Your inborn politesse,’ he repeats, astounded.

‘Yeah.’ Dimitri sticks his bottom lip out. ‘I’m an upstanding guy.’

‘Of course.’

‘Doesn’t mean we’re friends or anything.’

‘Of course not.’

‘You’re just self-centered.’

‘Completely.’

A moment passes. Beyond the dividing curtain, a member of the household snuffles and rolls over in their sleep. Dimitri breaks into a grin, teeth flashing white in the darkness, and begins to laugh. Gleb soon follows in suite.

 

 

 

It is not the most conducive environment in which to pose a confession. Gleb’s bald head is being thoroughly examined by a very inquisitive cow, for one. Through open slats in the wall, the Romanian landscape whips past at breakneck speed, the wind numbing their faces and deafening their hearing. And yet –

‘I dreamed about your brother,’ he tells Anya.

She glances at him, a little surprised, but hardly horrified. ‘Alyosha?’

‘He gave me a straw doll. Maslenitsa.’ He spares her the details of the broken leg, of her father’s garbled speech. The wall, stained with blood.

A crease appears between Anya’s brows. ‘He – we never went to the festival. It was deemed too dangerous. This message, it is for you, I think.’

Gleb frowns. ‘Would could your brother possibly wish to tell me?’

Anya purses her lips. Outside, a railway signal chimes past, the sound distorted by the buffeting wind. ‘He was such a strange little boy,’ she murmurs, very quietly. Her face is dull with regret. ‘The cheek of him, Gleb, I tell you. Always playing tricks on _mama_. But – that is not to say that he was cruel. _I_ was cruel. I – the things I said to my tutors, oh. You have no idea. But Alyosha… I don’t think I ever knew a person who felt so keenly the pain of others… There – there was a general at the Stavka… His son had just died… Alyosha sat with him all night.’ She sucks in a deep breath, steadying herself. ‘Did you know… that he would not suffer people bowing to him?’

And she sounds so proud, Gleb cannot help but smile. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘He _despised_ it.’ She pauses, and then snorts. ‘He’d have quite liked being called Comrade Romanov, I think.’

It is this remark that sends Gleb plummeting back into the present. It occurs to him, abruptly, that this is not some absent relative of Anya’s that he may some day meet. This is Alexei Romanov. A little boy that his regime mangled beyond recognition. A little boy that his father –

Gleb opens his mouth to – what? – _apologize?_ – but is interrupted by Anya’s satisfied sigh. She smiles up at Gleb from where she has been casting about in the straw. He sees that she has – wondrous girl – threaded him a doll. ‘Maslenitsa,’ she says, folding it into his hands. ‘Forgiveness.’

‘Anya, I –’

She shushes him, gently. ‘My brother would not want you to torture yourself over this, Gleb.’ Her eyes crinkle at the corners. ‘Neither do I.’

The kiss that she presses to his knuckles is quick and dry. That he is sitting on manure-sodden straw in a rickety train car – that he is almost certainly hurtling towards his untimely death in an intensive labor camp – means nothing to Gleb. His heart _soars_.

 

 

 

In Kishinev, there are clean sheets and a soft mattress. There is a greasy, fatty dinner cooked by the hotel’s buxom landlady that causes Gleb’s stomach to rapidly distend. There is even a bath! – Gleb cannot remember the last time he could pay for hot water, let alone a bath.

Afterward, they sit on the carpet and drink while Anya reads Pushkin by the light of the fire. ‘ _You wrote to me. Do not deny it. I have witnessed a trusting soul’s avowals, outpourings of innocent love; your candidness appeals to me, has excited in me emotions long grown silent –_ ’

Dimitri mutters some sort of innuendo in her ear, nosing at her cheek, and Anya bats him away, only to let him pepper her with kisses before the stanza is complete. Gleb watches this display from his slump against the armchair, fondly, as one might watch some favoured piece of theatre. Only by doing this can he sever himself from the yearning, hungry creature within that longs to touch, to hold.

He loves them. He wants to take up their darling faces in his hands and never let go.

‘ _But I am not made for bliss_ ,’ Anya reads, hoarse and half-drunk, ‘ _My soul is strange to it._ ’

 

 

 

He leaves them in a field several kilometers north of Odessa. Their train has stopped to refuel. Soon, it will be departing. A covered wagon waits some distance away to ferry Gleb to the Russian border (he is beginning to wonder if every deposed aristocrat in Europe owes Vlad Popov a favor).

Anya is walking Shvibzik alongside a hunched, elderly woman, speaking animatedly. Occasionally her gaze will stray to Gleb and quickly dart away, stricken looking. Beside him, Dimitri tuts and shakes his head. ‘She doesn’t want to say goodbye.’

‘No.’

‘You’d think she’d have gotten used to it by now.’ A low jab, intended to incite guilt. He needn’t have bothered. ‘What’s awaiting you back home, then?’

Gleb sniffs, ashing his cigarette. ‘Reeducation, probably.’

He’d meant it as a joke. Had not meant for Dimitri’s face to crumple, or for his own features to stiffen in a sudden rush of clarity. _Reeducation._ He pictures a cold, dark cell, buried miles beneath the Kremlin. Cattle-prods and sarin gas and god knows what other horrors.

‘Gleb,’ Dimitri croaks, ‘Why don’t you –’

They’re cut off by the whistle of the train ‘ _All aboard!_ ’ the conductor calls, and people begin shuffling their way back to their carriages. Anya bounds over to them, face a pale moon beneath her voluminous ushanka.

‘Oh, god. It’s time. Do you have your papers?’ Gleb smiles grimly, stubs out his cigarette, and presents her with his travel wallet like a dutiful boy. ‘Good. Good. That’s – good.’

She is smoothing down his lapels. Her hands, in her kid gloves, are shaking. Carefully, Gleb reaches up and clasps them in his own.

‘ _Anya_.’

‘This is wrong. This is – this feels like –’ She stops herself, blinking away tears. _Yekaterinburg_ , she was going to say. Somehow he knows it.

‘You two… the train…’ Dimitri calls, distractedly. He cannot seem to compel his feet to budge.

‘You are a _good man_ , Gleb,’ Anya enthuses, clenching her fists, ‘You are good and those bastards – Gorlinsky and the Commissariat – they will rip it out of you, piece by piece.’ He moves to look away, frightened by the force of her gaze, but she grasps his chin fiercely. ‘Come with us, Gleb. Come to Odessa.’ Nobody has ever spoken to him like this before. Not his father. Not his blessed, angel mother. Nobody has ever been so raw. ‘ _Stay_ ,’ she grits, and Gleb can see now how an army might march in her family’s name.

He vacillates. Somewhere far away – as if underwater – the conductor issues his final warning.

‘Stay. I pray you.’

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> And then they all run off to the Balkans and live out the rest of their days happy and in love!  
>   
> [♫](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xVl5a8YpI0)


End file.
